Gold Digger by Frances Fyfield Read Free Book Online Page B

have lunch in London every now and then, let him give us presents. We don’t need to keep him sweet. His conscience should do that. He’s going to look after us once he’s dead. He made his will long since, Raymond Forrest said. We don’t need to risk the children. I can’t bear them to be near him.’
    ‘There’s no risk to the children,’ Edward said, angrily. ‘They’re boys, not little girls, and he’s an old man. We should go. Besides, I need to look at the house. Do a little revaluation.’
    ‘I wonder what he means by a chaperone,’ Gayle said. ‘I wonder what he means by a party. I wonder what he’s trying to resurrect and who he’s trying to impress.’
    ‘I wish he was dead,’ Beatrice said. Patrick put his hands over his ears and rocked gently. He was an insignificant presence, always engaged in small, constant movement as if his fingers itched, however still he seemed. They appeared to assume that since he was generally so silent, he could not hear, either. He wanted to go to a party by the sea: Grandpa knew they never went to parties, and the fact that his parents might refuse the invitation filled him with despair.
    ‘He killed our mother,’ Beatrice intoned. ‘Abandoned us and killed her.’ She was usually over-dramatic, designed for martyrdom and always, it seemed to Edward, about to burst forth in a stream of malice disguised as a hymn of moral outrage.
    The portrait of them all was in Gayle’s home. For the moment, they were gathered in a small studio flat in Clerkenwell, a pied-à-terre owned by their father and frequented, in clandestine fashion, by their mother, Christina, before her disappearance. It was here that the evidence was found to unravel what was in Edward’s eyes her timely death. Receipts for prepaid tickets for a cross-channel ferry to which she was bound in pursuit of yet another lover or another kind of fortune, or maybe, cheap booze. Jumping or falling over the side was the best thing she could have done to save him from her constant rants on the subject of life’s injustices and the perfidy of his father-in-law, who had ruinedher life and her potential, blah, blah, blah. Gayle smiled at her husband, in a slight warning to hold his tongue and refrain from telling Beatrice that it was no wonder her husband had left her in her own herbal soup. She smelled of patchouli, dressed in sackcloth and her two sons were each twice the size of his only one.
    ‘We’ll go,’ Gayle announced, forestalling her self-righteous sister. ‘To keep the peace, we’ll go.’
    ‘No peace for the wicked,’ Beatrice sang. ‘I suppose he’ll invite other children, to meet ours. He wants to show us something. He wants to show us up. He’s courting us.’
    ‘He’s courting our children,’ Gayle said.
    I t was almost summer when they delivered the children for the party with the chaperone. Patrick would remember it forever, but then Patrick was the eldest and knew his grandfather in a way no one else did. Patrick had been here before, like his superior cousins who scarcely remembered and never noticed anything anyway.
    It was wicked, that party. There was a tent of shiny turquoise material in the centre of the big room, reaching from floor to ceiling, flickering lights on the walls and inside the tent, a tea party laid out on a low table covered with a white cloth. There were pink and yellow cakes and crisps and sweets and other things. The table was surrounded by cushions and resplendent on the biggest of these, facing the draped entrance to the tent, sat a large green frog, eating a sandwich. He had friendly eyes, this frog, and a nice voice.
    ‘Delicious!’ the Frog said. ‘Will you come and join me for tea once you’re dressed? Only in Fairyland, we like to dress specially for tea.’
    He took off his soft frog helmet and put on a red fez, andthere was Grandpa in a green coat with long white hair sticking out of his hat and over his collar and he was accompanied by a small